Joseph Nechvatal
BROOKE ALEXANDER
review by Carlo McCormick
Artforum
MARCH 1988
Transcendant
Saturation (1987) computer-robotic
assisted acrylic on canvas
In a manic
proliferation of communication, Joseph NechvatalÕs
over-mediated language streams across the viewerÕs info-fried consciousness as
a miasma of fuzzy, fleeting, and overlapping images. The result is something
like receiving television signals from several stations and data banks
simultaneously on a single screen and trying to read the tangled web of
electronic blips and blobs for whatever subliminal truths can be found there.
One way to look at NechvatalÕs development since his first shows in alternative
spaces in 1979 would be in terms of the various media with which he has chosen
to work, making major shifts in presentation without markedly altering his
artÕs complex graphic structure (which is based primarily on telecommunications
and its technology). However, the succession of pencil drawing, photocopying,
photography, rephotography, sculpture, and
computer-assisted painting tells only a part of the story. Over the past few
years, NechvatalÕs art, while remaining stylistically consistent with his
earlier work, has undergone a transformation of no minor significance. Although
his post-Modern tea leaves will always be open to different interpretations, he
appears to have moved away from direct sociopolitical assault and more into
hyper-sensory sublime.
In 1984
Nechvatal described himself as Òan agitator in the information war.Ó As an
artist, he saw things in terms of sociology and anthropology, and what
concerned him most were reality, ignorance, and the psychic numbing that has
come about through the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Of his process of
art making he said, ÒI tend to degenerate imagesÉ I rip off images from the media all the
time. Then I destroy them, transform them. It can come out beautifully.Ó This
involved appropriating photographic images, entering them into his Òvisual datapool,Ó and then transforming them by breaking them
down, contaminating and sublimating them, to make Òpictures that do not look
like pictures.Ó
In his
recent work, the degenerated images (now in Òcomputer/robotic assisted acrylic
on canvasÓ) form a vibrant surface that is less legible than ever. Its
self-consuming intensity digests its own content, which has become tangible
only as a transmission of unconscious ideas that never quite come into focus.
The social issues end up as sediment left in the cathartic rinse. As a reaction
against the soullessness of contemporary simulation art, Nechvatal has
deliberately sacrificed his polemical armor to find his own notion of freedom.
He has abandoned diatribe and irony in favor of mystery, thus finding a way out
of the ideologically oppressive dead end of post-Modernism. The too-hip
criticism in the arts media today only thinly disguises the redundancy of
long-exhausted and facile material. His alternative is not a conservative
regression into the clichŽs of romantic expression but to build from the rubble
of our deconstructed signs another ÒhigherÓ state of consciousness. What
matters is the viewerÕs play of the imaginationÑa point that Nechvatal once
made by quoting the TV character Edith Bunker on modern art: ÒItÕs not what you
see, itÕs what you think you see.Ó
Over the
years Nechvatal has exposed and examined the infrastructure of our contemporary
information network, and with his latest efforts he has begun to seek a deeper
understanding of its underlying mysteries. The seven paintings in this
exhibition, all from 1987, showed an even greater tendency toward pictorial
saturation than before, and a gothic self-referentiality
that transmutes the banal into a baroque fugue of intoxicating excess. This was
apparent in the titlesÑfor example, Wide Ecstatic Courage and Transcendental
Saturation. NechvatalÕs spirituality is a union of faith and science
anchored in sensory experience. And, for all his technological, semiotic, and
esthetic virtuosity, his greatest weapon is ecstasy itself.